Strange Things Spell Danger

It was amazing how my perspective changed. Sitting high above the road, my vision seemed to be improved by the height and broad windshield in front of me. I could see much further on either side of the freeway as well as up ahead. A real advantage in avoiding obstacles. The diesel engine was humming quite well now… Only sputtering once in a while when it choked on some bad chemical or another. I was glad to be running a diesel, because I knew the engine could run on a variety of fuel. I would have to look for alternative fuels in the future when all the diesel stored would become sour in time.

I hadn't gone far, when to my right as I passed the intersection to 151, I saw off in the distance, the partially destroyed and fire blackened dome of the capital of the state of Wisconsin. I didn't want to drive down into Madison to see what the destruction was. There still was no sign of human activity anywhere along this desolate and debris filled highway. Only occasional bones that could have been human or animal. I didn't stop to see. I had already seen too many human bones to count. Was anybody alive, anywhere? 

As I neared Janesville, I began to see smoke off to my left toward Chicago and off to my right toward Dubuque. The further I drove the more smoke I saw, rising high into the stratosphere. At first, I couldn't figure out how fires could still be burning three years after such devastating fires had swept through the entire area burning everything. There were no oil wells or other sources of long-burning fuel in those two locations, that I knew of.

And then, it dawned on me. Those could be unattended nuclear reactors in meltdown. Something that could burn for years and spew radioactivity in those clouds of smoke I saw.

I remembered seeing groundhogs on road trips between Minneapolis and Chicago years before all this happened. Seeing one up ahead by the side of the road, I pulled over to take a look at it. As I came around the front of the cab, the groundhog, looking overweight, struggled to return to its burrow, but I easily caught up with it and grabbed it by the tail. But the fur I was holding on to sloughed off and I had to grab the bare tail again to catch the poor creature.

I immediately saw what was causing the groundhog to have so much trouble. It was bloated, but not from fat, but from some internal ailment or infection. The poor rodent had some sort of terminal illness, just waiting for a predator to pick it off. There were sores and abscesses on it and its fur was missing in places. The telltale sign was a couple of large external tumors. All signs of radiation poisoning. I dropped the guy immediately upon making the realization. By touching him was I contaminated?

It became unnervingly obvious that the poor creature was right in the path of westerly wind radiation from that nuclear reactor melting down in the west. As I neared Rockford, I decided it was better to go east and got on the Tri-State Tollway. An hour later, I made it to the ruin that had been Chicago. I stopped and with my pad and the help of Google, I downloaded a map where all the nuclear reactors in the United States were. The East Coast wasn't a good place to go.

  I made it through all the toll gates all afternoon and past the silent O'Hare Airport on my way south at considerable cost, having to push many vehicles out of the way just to get through while the black cloud to my left on the south side of Chicago loomed ever larger. The sun was setting when I reached Interstate 80. I turned right and headed west again, regretting that I hadn't just gone south on US 51 through Rockford. But it didn't make any difference that I had gone the wrong way. I had all the time in the world and no one to see my mistake.

  In all that time, I hadn't seen evidence of anyone, not a soul.  They all had either left or died.  I suspect that most of them did the latter from the bodies I was finding everywhere I went.  Besides, what would they run to? I pulled over to the side of the road and turned in for the night. July 20. Two months before I needed to hole up for winter.

At first light, I was back on the road again. The cornfields of northern Illinois were gone except for occasional volunteer stalks that were already ten foot tall, ripe with corn and looming high over the native prairie grass that was rapidly taking over. There was a three foot tall cover of grasses hiding predators and prey alike. The black cloud on the right loomed larger as I got closer to it.

But, something else caught my eye up ahead. Standing in the middle of the road was a cow! As I approached, I could see that it was a Holstein by its black-and-white coloring that was quite dirty. It didn't move to get out of the way like it was wanting suicide by truck. But as I got closer I could see that it was sick, like the groundhog.

The cow's udder had lesions and some of its hair was falling off. In spite of all the grass, its ribs were prominently showing through its hide. I stopped the truck and got out to take a look and found that there were tumors, one on the animal's neck just behind the right ear and a large one near the base of the udder hanging down. I wanted to put the poor thing out of its misery and take some beef with me, but decided not to because of the radioactivity the animal probably had in its system. To save ammunition, I found the hammer used to unlock the trailer from the tractor and with as hard a blow as I could muster, killed the cow right there in the road. I was surprised that predators hadn't already done that job.

  Here still, there was much evidence of firestorms that scorched everything while it melted metal and cracked the concrete on the interstate.  These firestorms were probably the primary cause of death for refugees and marauders, alike.  This prairie-like region was the hardest for me because it was flat and all the crops had probably burned in one huge fire after many months of drought that brought the normal corn and soybean crops to tinder dry.  Now, after three years, some of the corn had reseeded itself, but was drying out in the baking sun without irrigation or enough rain.  Volunteer soybeans were doing better, covering huge areas, but were also dying of the lack of rain. With all the abandoned trucks and cars on the road, I was lucky to make it to Omaha before I needed to stop again for the night. I found trees again in the Missouri River bluffs that had escaped fire and provided a more normal, if very hot, night.

Sometime during the night, a storm came up, at first blowing soil ahead of it like a major dust storm that the AC system kept out of my bed, followed by the front that moved the truck and tore down burned trees all around, followed by intense lightning and hail the size of golf balls that pelted the truck like it was being beaten, followed by tornadoes I heard in the distance raking through with unconscionable sound and fury. Storms I would have to get used to but find it impossible to avoid.

The last insult was the mud that was part of the rain, eventually covering the entire tractor with a mud layer that fell from the sky. The mud left a mess that was impossible to clean up without water.  Indeed, the whole landscape around me was covered with a brand-new two inch layer of mud.  By 9 am, the mud had dried up sufficiently for me to drive on it without sliding on the slimy mess.

         Under my big tires, the mud became dust and blew up behind the tractor like I was driving on a gravel road, creating my own dust storm.  I continued westward and by late afternoon was in view of the Rockies looming ahead. Some things hadn't changed.